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Garden in the City: My Potatoes Are Flowering, Now Die Blooms, Die

By Patty Wetli | July 8, 2015 1:22pm | Updated on July 9, 2015 10:32am

ALBANY PARK — The Great Potato Experiment of 2015 is showing signs of life.

The big development this past week has been the appearance of flowers at the tip of one of my plants. Up til now, it seems, I haven't been growing potatoes, I've been growing leaves.

Potato blossom. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]

Flowering, according to the National Gardening Association, is a sign that the plant has finished putting on a display, foliage-wise, and is ready to get down to the business of developing tubers.

Or not.

"Some varieties will produce great potatoes with no flowering at all," said the NGA's "how potatoes grow" guide.

Argh. Basically when I turned to the nation's authorities for advice on potatoes, they threw up their hands and told me, "Whatevs."

Patty Wetli discusses how this cool summer has affected the garden:

This is why it drives me nuts when I tell people, "I have no idea how my potatoes [or tomatoes or corn or peppers] are going to turn out," and they respond with, "Well did you follow the directions?"

They don't get that I'm not in charge here.

There are ways the potatoes "should" behave or are "likely" to and the best I can hope for is that they know this.

So what I'm looking for next, if all goes according to plan, is for the flowers to die. This, the NGA tells me, is "the signal to the gardener that the harvest is at hand."

Between now and then, I'm going to try to find some straw to build up my mound (on the advice of a real-life human gardener) because this is where the potatoes gestate — in the mound, not the ground. At least that's what I've gathered, though it makes no sense to me.

I'll also be crossing my fingers for continued cool weather.

"Research showed that fewer and fewer tubers were formed on the plants as the temperature went from 68o to 84oF. In fact, none formed at 84 deg F," according to NGA.

I know, I know, sub-par temperatures are ruining everyone's summer. I don't care. My taters trump your tan.

Unless, of course, like the whole "maybe the plant needs to flower, maybe it doesn't" ambiguity, heat is neither here nor there.

In that case, let the mercury rise.

Whatevs.

Vegetable Plot Week-by-Week Comparison

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I was complaining that my garden didn't need me?

Crisis over.

Sudden growth spurt in the vegetable plot. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]

Every couple of days, I've got chard to harvest, my beans are hitting their stride, the tomatoes need pruning, the corn could use some fertilizing and the basil requires constant monitoring to keep from bolting.

Boo-yah, I have purpose again.

Flower Beds

I've been showing you the weekly progress of my "parkway transformation," which frankly hasn't transformed nearly as much as I initially intended. I definitely need to rethink my approach there, which may or may not include getting a professional opinion.

But my flower beds, that's where the real action is. Any day now, there's going to be an explosion of color as my coneflowers come into full bloom. And I've got this dwarf variety of sunflower that'll blossom after that.

Here's a short six-second video I shot to capture all the pretty.

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